


Minutes Before Eternity

by Secret Staircase (elwing_alcyone)



Category: Zero: Shisei no Koe | Fatal Frame III: The Tormented
Genre: Comment Fic, Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-09
Updated: 2011-03-09
Packaged: 2017-10-16 19:51:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/168739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elwing_alcyone/pseuds/Secret%20Staircase
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hisame looks at the Manor once more after everyone else is dead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Minutes Before Eternity

Hisame has never been disobedient before, but it doesn’t seem to matter so much now. She has done all her duties, completed them promptly and without hesitation; her work has always been exemplary, whether it is sweeping, or studying, or serving, or killing. This is only one little thing, not a defiance, just a slight twist of the family head’s instructions; and it won’t be for long.

She has impaled so many dolls and people that the hammer and stake feel like part of herself. In the bare, tiny room with nothing in it but a peephole and the other two Handmaidens dead on the floor, she hammers dolls and listens. For a while she can hear the family head singing the lullaby, her voice cracked and rough, the words beginning to blur towards the end as the pain takes her. Then, at last, the song dies away, and Hisame knows she’s really alone now.

With a low, thrilling sense of rebellion – a feeling she’s never dared to indulge before – Hisame ducks out through the hidden door in the wall and stands in the corridor. The whole Manor is before her – the parts that aren’t locked, at least.

She walks out and to the top of the stairs, looking out over the hearth room. Two candles still burn, drawing the darkness about them. No need to extinguish candles now. No need to save them up for other nights. This is the last.

Hisame walks down the stairs a step at a time, moving with exaggerated care. It wouldn’t do to fall and break her back. It wouldn’t do to die there at the bottom of the staircase in pain. No.

She moves lightly over the raised tatami floor. She can hear every sound she is making: her own breathing, quick and shallow with excitement; the pad of her cold bare feet on the dry mats; the whispery rustle of her sleeves against her loose trousers, the clink of metal when she shifts the hammer and stake to her left hand in order to feel the warm ashes that have burned out in the hearth.

Standing in the centre of the room, she turns in a complete circle, looking at everything. There, the window to the room where Kyouka died. There, the ladder to the head carpenter’s room, where he studied and drew plans and watched over the other carpenters in their quarters below. He’s dead in the sacrificial pillar room now, directly below the room where Shigure and Minamo are sleeping forever.

The candles flicker, and she imagines the dead crouched behind the screens, under the stairs, beneath the raised area upon which she stands. It doesn’t frighten her. Why should it? She’ll be one of them soon.

Next she goes to the locked door that leads into the sealed section of the Manor. She thinks of all those empty rooms, growing damp and cold: rooms where she once walked and lived and belonged. She would have given her life a hundred times for this household. At first she was angry with Amane for causing the unleashing, but at least this way, she doesn’t have to leave the shrine at the end of her service. She can stay here forever.

She presses her ear to the wood and listens, but it’s silent there too.

It’s time. Hisame could go into the entrance if she wanted; she could open the door and look out at the snow falling in the night, feel the cold wind prickling her skin, tangling her hair. If she wanted, she could even leave. She smiles at the thought. The smile makes her look old and somehow ghastly, but she doesn’t know that.

She ascends the stairs again, pausing at the top to look back over the empty room. One of the remaining candles died while she was down there, and as she watches, the last flickers out, and the darkness rises like black water. Hisame is the last living person to see the Manor before it is entirely drowned. That is all she wanted.

With a light heart and a clear conscience, she returns to the bare, enclosed room. It was only a small disobedience, she thinks, as she settles herself on the floor between Minamo and Shigure. Just a few minutes before eternity.


End file.
